El Niño

When we were living in Santa Marta the weather was extremely hot because it was summer there. There was a severe lack of rain and often when we walked past a river bed we noticed that there was hardly any water in it. Lots and lots of people were very worried about the drought because there was hardly enough water to drink. The wind there was wild nearly all the time so it made a kind of whooshing noise in our apartment and we could barely shut the door! Here is a video showing you the wind there:

Often people we knew and taxi drivers would blame the drought on a climate pattern called “El Niño”. El Niño is when the water in the Pacific Ocean near the equator gets hotter than usual and affects the atmosphere and weather around the world. El Niño is Spanish for ‘The Little Boy’.